2 Day Argolis Tour

UNESCO site: Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns (1999) · Overnight: Nafplio

An hour out of Athens we stop at the Corinth Canal — a slot cut 79 metres down through solid limestone between 1882 and 1893, narrow enough that ships still pass under tow. It marks the line where the Peloponnese begins, and it explains Corinth itself: the city sat astride the isthmus, controlling the land route north–south and the sea route between the Aegean and the Ionian.

Nemea is next: a guided tour and tasting at one of the region’s wineries. Agiorgitiko has been grown in this valley since antiquity — the Nemean Games were held here, and the wine now carries Protected Designation of Origin status.

Then Mycenae, the first World Heritage Site of the tour. This was the capital of the civilisation Homer wrote about — the citadel of Agamemnon. We walk the Lion Gate, the Grave Circles where Schliemann found his gold, and the palace at the summit, inside walls of stone blocks so large that later Greeks assumed the Cyclopes had built them. Nearby stands the Treasury of Atreus, the finest of the beehive tombs — a dry-laid vault whose span went unmatched in Europe for the next fifteen hundred years. The visit ends at the archaeological museum, where the finds bring the Mycenaean world into focus. UNESCO inscribed Mycenae in 1999, together with nearby Tiryns.

The day ends in Nafplio, declared the first capital of liberated Greece in 1829. You stay the night. The rest of the day is yours — the sea wall, the cobbled lanes of the old town, and more tavernas than you can work through in one evening.

UNESCO site: Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus (1988) · Ends: Athens

The morning starts with the Archaeological Museum of Nafplio — small, and better than it has any right to be — and then Palamidi, the Venetian fortress on the 216-metre hill above the town. Eight bastions, built between 1711 and 1714 in an astonishing three years, and lost to the Ottomans in 1715, the year after they were finished. The view runs the length of the Argolic Gulf.

We then cross to the Argolid’s Saronic coast for a seaside lunch, before Epidaurus. The sanctuary of Asklepios was antiquity’s foremost healing centre — set among pine-clad hills, it includes the abaton, where pilgrims slept in the hope of a healing dream, and the theatre: 4th century BC, still in use, and with acoustics that carry an ordinary speaking voice from the orchestra to all 14,000 seats. UNESCO inscribed it in 1988.

On the way back to Athens, a last stop at an olive oil production facility — olive oil being the oldest thing Greece has ever exported, and still the thing it does best.